Russia just loosened its rules on when it can unleash nuclear weapons, and Reuters sees the timing as a clear warning to the US. On Tuesday, Vladimir Putin formally changed Moscow's nuclear doctrine by lowering the threshold for when it can use nukes against its enemies. The move follows through on a pledge Putin made in September, notes the New York Times, but implementation of the change comes just days after the US reversed itself and gave Ukraine permission to fire longer-range American missiles inside Russia. In fact, Ukraine fired the first of those missiles on Tuesday.
- New doctrine: Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional weapons attack that creates "a critical threat to their sovereignty and (or) their territorial integrity," per Reuters. The previous doctrine stipulated a threat to the "very existence of the state," per CNN.
- Joint attack: Further, the new doctrine considers an attack by a nonnuclear nation backed by a nuclear ally to be a joint attack by both, per the AP. Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called this a "very important paragraph," notes the Times.
"The big picture is that Russia is lowering the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a possible conventional attack," Alexander Graef of the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg tells Reuters. (More Russia-Ukraine war stories.)
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